Who Are the Nobodies?
by lye tea
Summary: They follow crayon-dabbed paths to authentic truths. And with them, they discard their bleached shells. /Roxas x Naminé/


**A/N: **For Myoni. I'm sorry but I'm really no good with Kingdom Hearts. :(

* * *

**Who Are the Nobodies?**

I'm nobody! Who are you?  
Are you nobody, too?  
Then there's a pair of us - don't tell!  
They'd banish us, you know!

How dreary to be somebody!  
How public like a frog  
To tell one's name the livelong day  
To an admiring bog!

—_Emily Dickinson _

**1. This as oblivions used to say—**

_This was the place they said she should stay. This was the place they said she belonged. _(This was the place they locked her down, bound her—head in toe—to the ground, shackled, tackled under, packed, _congested_.) This was the place where old, cold abyss came to rest.

Someone once told her she was a puppet-girl, a flippant doll, a lesser-than-less marionette. And why she stood (thin, wry, and frail) had been all a matter of luck. (Of unconscious mistakes and inhumane megrims.) And that—since her life was painted—since she was tainted (no heart, no soul) she could do whatever she wanted.

(Within reason, it was always that preemptive strike, called condition.)

"Here," they gestured grandly, "There are no rules" _except for our own_ "And you can do whatever you want" _except what you desired most_ "And we will let you do that" _as long as you obeyed. _

(Naminé nodded.) "I understand," she tried to speak. Except it came out unprotected and jolted and _hurting_.

But, only—

(she could be an artist) if only she could really listen and really conform, no questions asked, no vacillations. They gave her canvases and brushes (gallons upon gallons of sidereal paints, firmament-based, alcoholic stupors) and told her she could draw, sketch, whatever. If she wanted (addendum added, very important).

And Naminé would shake her head (then grab for the brush, nearest, boarish bristle and white) and quickly dab out her subconscious—the Freudian Id, with the precise name lost on the tip of the tongue—and out she would draw rivulets and valleys of dreams. Those she kept hidden, those she liked _best_.

Sometimes, if she had been exceptionally good and servile, they would come and collect her masterpieces. Frame them, they explained, and leave her with another empty mess to fulfill.

And so, she would take up her brush again and do what they want. _I am—_she began to write—_nobody_. (What was a nobody?) And no one answered.

She knocked, with no one at the door.

**2. Sentinel duty with no repercussions—**

If there were ranks, he would have risen rapidly. Fast and swift, _like lightning_, he could contort minds and twist words (prevarication is a true art only achieved through honing—homing down). He could make them believe what he said, and only that, was true. Except—

he had a conscience (he liked to think). And it was nice, portraying himself as _human_ and _real_. And not as "just a human abortion".

The world spun 'round and 'round, and the world dictated for him to do-this and do-that and do-whatever-the-hell-we-want, you damn bastard child. And he did. He did all that was ordered with alacrity, with meticulous clarity. And yet—

It was not enough (nothing was). There was a void ebbing, eating, away at his heart and spine. A small, miasmic (completely _abhorrent_) bacterial infection. And _oh_, how horrendous it was. And how—_damn_—no matter what medicine, what anodyne wasteland of healing bitterweeds (placebos, for all their worthlessness) he took, nothing cured his aches.

"We have a new assignment for you."

At eight in the morning, _sharp_, Roxas awoke with a _start_. And up he leapt, and down he fled, to the foyer (the majestic inception) and awaited new comands.

(They—"management"—snarled and cackled and dealt him the most odious tasks. So what? They couldn't care less. He _asked_ for it.)

And Roxas never once dared to think their demanding, demeaning ways were sadistic and insane. Because he was _programmed _to think in that sense, and it was impossible for otherwise. O, in this Brave New World! Everyone had places and regulations to abide by, preordained before birth. And his place was at the bottom of the sewer. A rat (with a solitary friend named Marat).

In a perfectly distilled dystopia, there was no room for "chances" and "musings".

(The muses had long been slaughtered.)

**3. We meet, to part, life as—**

For the first time in their lifetimes, what must have been once every thousand years, they met. She was diaphanous like a fairytale princess (from Disney and its platitudes and soft-handed damsels-in-distress) and looked _the part_. From whatever mythological madhouse nutcase: Waterhouse's _Ophelia_ or Tennyson's darling _Lady_ (of Shalott), Naminé was beautiful.

(Roxas thought his heart had splintered in two. Really, she was that stunning. Glassy eyes and sickly, pearly skin. Moon-jaundice, sea-myopia, and inferno-cholera.)

He carefully reached out to touch her, a strand of hair, an exposed naked shoulder. Something. To feel, to guarantee (assuage his beating red-ruddy organ) that she was actually there, across from him. Reflecting back disbeliefs and disenchantments with somber eyes.

Ice-cased, caved in, deeply burrowed, and water ghosts. _Whatever_ she reminded him.

He didn't care.

(And some small part of him remembered Them telling him to "get rid of her, got it?" and the bigger part saying _no_.)

Roxas wanted to wrap her in his arms. (Naminé shirked back, terrified.)

"We are the Nobodies," he stated in soft, solemn, lucid e-nun-ci-a-tion.

_Yes_.

"And we are no better than toys to Them. They control us, our lives, everything."

_But not our minds_.

"And if we challenge Their laws, we die."

_Better that than—_

Naminé blinked, lost for thought-words.

(I am neurotic, and you are psychotic. And these are the castles in the sky I painted for us. In them, we will dwell, wandering forever with our religious chimeras.)

She took his words, droning spectacular philosophies, at value. Burned them, memorized like endless sutras. She learned them by heart.

And together, slowly, they really became Nobodies.


End file.
